Category Archives: Business

Dork

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Yesterday was, for all intents and purposes, a snow day. They closed the school down at 1. Of course, I had no classes anyway, just some work that could be done anywhere. But this was a snow day. You don’t do work. At least, not the work you’re supposed to.

Kyle, always being curious about the hardware side of things, sent me a link to the RoomWizard downloads page after fishing out the hardware specs elsewhere. There were two things that interested me–one was that you could download a firmware image. The other was that they had a PDF of how to use their API.

Wait… API? That means… it’d be trivial to write an interface to these things!

The problem is that the manual never mentions the actual address of the API, which is just accessed over HTTP and returns XML. They give a few examples–/rwconnector is used most often. But alas, /rwconnector on these throws a 404.

Somewhat discouraged, I started poking around the firmware image. It’s a .tar.gz, and extracts… a (fairly) normal Linux filesystem. Besides some juicy stuff that I hope admins are instructed to change (there are several privileged user accounts), I also found some neat stuff. For one, it’s based on SuSE, but a very trimmed-down version. And it’s basically a full-functioning Linux machine, including an SMTP server, Apache Tomcat, etc.

But then I hit gold. There’s a configuration file for Tomcat, which mentions one URL of /Connector. So I fired it up and tried it in on one of the systems. Bingo!

So then I read a bit more of the API manual. It’s actually very simple–you can retrieve, edit, and delete bookings. (The edit and booking doesn’t let you do anything you can’t do via the web interface, by the way, lest anyone think this is a security flaw.) You get an XML document back with results.

So then I had to figure out how to get PHP to parse XML. It turns out that PHP actually has several ways to do it, including SimpleXML and DOM objects. I spent a while learning it and by the end of the day, I had a prototype working that would get reservations for the next 24 hours and parse out the information. (Small tip–don’t try to “escape” colons when dealing with XML. They denote a namespace. When you get rb:name, for example, the tag name is just name, in the rb namespace. Knowing this a little sooner would have saved me about half an hour of, “This code is so simple! Why doesn’t it work?!”)

The next step is to insert all of this into an SQL database, and then write a nice viewer for it. And also to experiment with adding bookings, although that should just require changing a line of code.

I haven’t actually written code to do timing, but it feels like it’s 1-2 seconds for me to get the XML data back, which suggests that the bottleneck is in its little database. Short-term, I want to write myself a little interface that will parse all the data, cache it, and give me a faster interface. Long-term, I want to try to see if I can get the library to adopt this, and have it be the booking mechanism. You can store them to a local database, and then have a background process use the API to push reservations out to the respective RoomWizards, so that they continue to function normally. But when people view the page, it’ll just get it all from the local database, meaning that the whole “Get the listings via API” thing is no longer necessary. (Unless you want to rebuild the database in case of a disk failure!)

Criticizing Web Apps

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As long as I’ve posted a lengthy diatribe about how awful the library room-booking web interface is, there are two more that drive me nuts.

We have a way of putting in work orders for maintenance. Last semester I tried to open one of our windows and it just fell out. This semester, we had three different light fixtures burn out in 2 days time. So you go online and put in a work order. This is a great thing to have web-based. Except they picked this insane system that opens multiple browser windows, resizes your browser (?!), uses copious JavaScript requiring you to double-click on links… And it only works in IE. Oh, and there are irritating things that could be fixed with one line of code… You log in with your student ID, which is eight-digits that inexplicably have an @ sign in front of them. So they have this big note on how you cannot use the at sign, you must only use your eight-digit number. One line of code could just strip it out if it was included.

Much like booking library rooms, submitting help tickets is a Programming 101 exercise. In fact, it’s easier than the library interface, because you don’t have to do time calculations. You have an employees table, a clients table, and a work table. Tasks get entered into work by the client, and the staff assigns an employee to it. And when it’s done, you set work.status to “Complete,” a simple ENUM field. This is like 45 minutes of coding, although I’d probably spend more time prettying up the interface.

Then there’s the computer help desk, another web app. For one thing, all the links to it point to an http:// URL. But if you actually use them, it barfs up an error that you must view it over a secure channel. Being a web dork, I just take “s” onto the end of “http” and life is golden. To someone who’s not so good with computers, and who’s already at wits’ end with their computer, they’re probably going to break down and cry, because even the help desk webpage doesn’t work for them.

This, too, only works in IE. In this case, they didn’t have copious bizarre crap (like requiring double-clicking on links), so I set Firefox to pretend it was IE. The page loads okay, but looks terrible, with nothing lining up right. IE and, well, the rest of the world, have differing views on how lots of things are done, but requiring IE really isn’t the best solution. Oh, and as an added bonus, they control your mouse cursor, preventing it from indicating links in any manner. This means that someone took time to write code that does nothing but decrease usability.

But worst of all, even if you use IE like they demand, if you actually try to click on any tickets to view them, you get taken to a random system with a long canonical hostname, which just throws you “HTTP 400 – Bad Request.”

So last night, I submitted a help desk ticket indicating that the help desk is broken. Because, frankly, it doesn’t work. All of its internal links take you to the wrong server (or, seemingly, the right server but with the wrong hostname), and that’s assuming you’re smart enough to get in, by understanding the error indicating that you need to use HTTPS, not HTTP.

Most of these things are sold as turnkey devices, it seems. Maybe I should start a company making them. Apparently, no technical expertise is required to do so.

RoomWizard

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Even though I got to a business school and am a management major, my real passion is working on websites.

We just build a new library here, for millions and millions of dollars. We use a tool called RoomWizard for booking rooms. We get a web-based interface to book library rooms. This is a great idea. Unfortunately, it’s so fraught with bugs that it borders on unusable.

The main “bug” is that it’s basically so slow that it’s unusable. I tried viewing the source, and it’s got a HUGE block of JavaScript that’s a pain to read. Most of the page is being generated on the fly with JavaScript. There are times when this is the best way to do something. This is not one of them.

My current understanding–I may be wrong, since I’m still trying to make sense of this–is that each of the touch-screen units on the wall is a webserver. It’s responsible for storing all of its reservations. So when you view the main page, JavaScript has you going out to each of the 20+ rooms and requesting their status. The problem is that this takes forever, probably at least 15 seconds. By the time the page has finished drawing, it’s about time for the 60-second refresh to kick in.

I did a bit of viewing headers. The main page is running on ASP.net, but each individual room controller (probably like a 300 MHz embedded chip?) is running Apache Tomcat. Someone did a quick port scan and found that the devices have a lot of open ports–ftp, ssh, telnet (!), HTTP, and port 6000, which nmap guessed was X11. So I have a pretty good feeling these things are running embedded Linux.

Another problem is that there’s always one or two of the devices that, for whatever reason, are unreachable. So you get errors on those ones.

Booking conference rooms is like a Web Programming 101 interface. You get a basic introduction to SQL databases, and write a little interface. You could run this on an old 1 GHz PC with 128 MB of RAM and have pages load in fractions of a second, especially if you really knew how to configure a webserver. (Turn on APC and MySQL query caching, in this case, and you’re golden.) I cannot fathom why they thought it was a good idea to have a page make connections to 25 different little wall-mounted touchscreens. This places a big load on what have got to be underpowered little units, and is just a nightmare any way you look at it. I really see no benefit to what they’re doing.

Furthermore, this breaks off-campus connections, since you can’t connect to these units remotely.

You convert the wall-mounted RoomWizards from embedded webservers into a little web browser client, and they just pull down the data from the main server.

With a traditional, single database, it would also be easy to write a little search tool–“I need a room on Friday from 3:00 to 5:00.” This is a fairly simple SQL query. This is not a fairly simple question to ask 25 wall-mounted touchscreen things.

I’m tempted to write a little PHP script to go out, retrieve the data, and cache it. Essentially a hacked-together proxy…

Radio

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I’m a long-term radio geek, and I’ve realized that the technology interests me more than actually using it. Having worked with lots and lots of radios (I realized that I have three sitting on my desk, all of which I have used in the past 30 minutes), I’ve concluded that I’d like to start a radio company. Our motto would be, “Our radios don’t suck.”

One of my radios is a ham radio, which is front-panel programmable (FPP), meaning that you can punch in frequencies on the keypad. This is pretty common with ham radios. By contrast, land-mobile radios (things that, say, a police officer would carry) very rarely have FPP capability; in fact, the FCC frowns on certifying radios with that capability, except for certain federal agencies that need to be able to reprogram their radios in the field. However, it’s often offered as a software add-on. But even using the ham radio, it’s really hard to use. Part of the problem is that the radio’s probably a decade old, and the print on the keypad has worn off. So I’m guessing at what buttons do.

There are very few radios with a graphic LCD. Dot-matrix LCDs almost seem cutting-edge in the radio world. By contrast, try to find a cell phone that doesn’t have a big color LCD on it. I have an old Garmin GPS III, and still admire that screen. I think it’s four shades of gray, and fairly high resolution. It’s a nice graphic LCD. It’s so much easier to use, and introduces stuff like the ability to “arrow” around a screen, as opposed to trying to use obscure key combinations. I’d actually love to see something like a 2″ by 2″ e-ink display (which, in addition to looking amazing, would reduce power usage), but it’d be a pain since it’s slow to redraw.

Motorola’s MDC1200 technology is practically ubiquitious in the public safety industry, transmitting a 1200 bps data burst containing a four-digit identifier. This could be so easily improved. Put a little $20 GPS chip in it, and have it transmit GPS coordinates on each transmission. (You could also include stuff like battery level, if on a portable, and information on received signal strength. The latter would be useful to run in the background and plot a map of the radio system’s reach.)

Programming is always a pain. Some of Motorola’s radios are programmed in ways that are so obscure that they border on comical. (I think the goal there is security.) I want to write an XML file for my radio. Put a USB port on the side of the radio. Let me hook it up to a computer, or just plug a thumb drive in and reprogram from that. But consider bigger problems, though. Boston PD switched to an “improved” channel lineup last year. Apparently they worked for weeks to pull radios in at the end of a shift, load up the new set of data, but leave the radios set to old configuration, until all the radios had the new programming in them. And then, at a quiet time one day, they broadcast a message telling officers how to switch to the new configuration. Over-the-air programming is possible, but it’s generally used in some specific situations. (OTACS, Motorola’s Over The Air Channel Steering, to direct a radio to switch to a particular channel, and OTAR, Over the Air Rekeying, to send new encryption keys to the radios.) Why not let the system send out bursts of programming data when the radio system is idle, loading up new programming data in the background, until they’re ready? Obviously, all of these programming things need some security constraints, but that’s trivial to implement.

I’m pretty confident that software-defined radio is going to become ubiquitous in the next decade, but no one’s really making use of it yet, except for uber-geeks in labs. APCO’s Project 25 digital voice (IMBE) has emerged as a standard in digital voice, but it’s meant to be made obsolete in the future by a “Phase II” implementation. Various other technologies have come and gone, such as Motorola’s VSELP. And there exist myriad trunking protocols for larger networks. I want to embrace SDR and use it in everything, “future-proofing” radios. (Of course companies have an incentive to not future-proof their hardware, forcing people to upgrade… But you can still make your money on selling software upgrades!)

Oh, and put an SD slot on the darn thing. Record the audio it receives, letting people play back transmissions they miss. Or host applications. (Or, permit programming!)

Intuitive

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GRE, a (radio) scanner company that makes a lot of the scanners Radio Shack sells, also sells some under their own name.

This new one advertises an “Intuitive ‘Object Oriented’ User Interface Design,” which brings all the fun of OOP to a GUI. The picture of the radio reads “Press NEW to create objects,” and has three softkeys, labeled “NEW,” “EDIT,” and “GLOB.”

I’ll reserve final judgment until I play around with one, but, on the surface, this seems anything but intuitive.

Tweaking SQL

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I was thinking last night about solid-state drives. In their current form, they’re really not that much faster in terms of throughput: a decent amount are actually even slower than ATA disks if you measure them in terms of MB/sec throughput. Where they shine (100 times faster, at least) is seek time, though. So where they’re ideally suited for in a server environment right now is something with lots of random reads, where you might find yourself jumping all over the disk. For example, a setup with lots and lots of small files scattered across the disk.

Many implementations of a database would be similar. Something like the database for this blog will have a lot of sequential reads: you’re always retrieving the most recent entries, so the reads tend to be fairly close. But there are lots of ways to slice the data that don’t result in reading neighboring rows or walking the table. (And what really matters is how it’s stored on disk, not how it’s stored in MySQL, but I’m assuming they’re one in the same.) Say I view my “Computers” category. That’s going to use reads from all over the table. Using a solid-state disk might give you a nifty boost there. So I think it’d be fun to buy a solid-state disk and use it in an SQL server. I wager you’d see a fairly notable boost in performance, especially in situations where you’re not just reading sequential rows.

But here’s the cool link of this post. I’m not sure exactly what goes on here in a technical sense, but they use solid-state drives, getting the instant seek time, but they also get incredible throughput: 1.5GB/sec is the slowest product they offer. I think there may be striping going on, but even then, with drives at 30MB/sec throughput, that’d be 50 drives. The lower-end ones look to just be machines with enormous RAM (16-128 GB), plus some provisions to make memory non-volatile. But they’ve got some bigger servers, which can handle multiple terabytes of storage on Flash, and still pull 2GB/sec of throughput, which they pretty clearly state isn’t counting stuff cached in RAM (which should be even faster).

I want one.

Bringing Down the Web

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Engadget (but strangely, no mainstream news sites?) is reporting that a fourth underseas fiber cable has been pierced in the Middle East.

People are now starting to draw the conclusion I draw the second time: something fishy is going on. (Err, no pun intended there…)  Underseas cables don’t get cut that often, but for four of them to get cut in a week, and all to a war-torn region?

Someone is pretty clearly trying to cut off the Internet to that part of the world, and they’re doing a pretty good job. Fortunately, the Internet has always been designed to route around failures like this, but it seems like they’ve taken out a huge chunk of the backbone to some parts of the world. There was an earthquake to that region, too, though. But still, I’m suspicious.

Of course, some are saying that the fourth line wasn’t actually cut, but apparently just suffered technical issues not related to the underseas line itself. But still, I’m calling shenanigans. I’m just not sure which motive is at play: are they resisting Western influence? Trying to prevent technology? Obsessed with censorship? There are multiple motives, just as there are many, many possible culprits.

Although I have to hand it to them: those underseas cables look incredibly resilient, and I can’t imagine that too many people know where every single one is located.

MySQL

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Sun bought MySQL.

Also, Sun’s CEO {has a blog, doesn’t know how to resize images other than changing the HTML attributes}.

Remember back when they were a little below $5 a share and I said I thought they were going somewhere?

Next time I’m putting my money where my mouth is. They closed at $15.92 a share on Friday.

Of course, some are wondering whether this was a good buy. Not necessarily whether MySQL is good (it’s perhaps the most widely-used database in the world), but whether it makes sense to pay a billion dollars for it, when it’s (1) primarily an OpenSource product, and (2) going to take something like 20 years of revenues to break even. While I don’t quite buy the bit about it being a conspiracy with Oracle to kill the project, you should check out the page they link to, Sun’s list of acquisitions. It’s so bad that Sun appears to have a photograph of a dumpster with the Sun logo on it. (Okay, it’s a shipping crate. But it doesn’t make a ton of sense, and you have to grant that it looks a little bit like a dumpster.) It reminds me of when Sun bought Cobalt for $2 billion, and Cobalt went belly-up shortly thereafter. (I still think RaQs could be hot sellers today, by the way, if they were still being made. To take a company doing incredibly well and have it go belly-up in under a year takes some incredible mis-management.)

Torrent Hosting

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So I’m contemplating posting my BlueQuartz VMware image on VMware’s “Appliances” page, where it’d probably get a decent amount of downloads. I strongly doubt I’ll run into my bandwidth limit (it’d have to be downloaded about 3,000 times in a month), but I still don’t want to use bandwidth I don’t have to. When you’re distributing a big file to lots of people all of a sudden, BitTorrent is the perfect solution.

Unlike distributing, say, a bootleg movie, there’s an ‘official source’ for a lot of legitimate torrent hosting. This doesn’t mean anything in BitTorrent, but I think it should. The official source wants to ‘host’ it, but get people to help with bandwidth over BitTorrent.

There should be an easy way for them to host the file. Run a single command, pass it the file you want to distribute, and it’ll automatically create a .torrent file, register with some trackers (or host your own?), and begin seeding the file. In practice, this would probably take 10-15 minutes of work by hand. That’s pathetic.

There’s also a catch 22 at first: you want seeders (people who have the whole file and upload it to their peers), since, without them, no one can get the file. But you need a seeder before anyone can be a seeder. The obvious solution is to seed your own file, and this is how it’s done. But, as the ‘official’ distributor of a file, you don’t want to burn through bandwidth, so it makes sense that you’d want to throttle your available bandwidth: if there were lots of other seeders, you’d only use a small amount of bandwidth. By keeping the ‘server’ up as a permanent seeder, you alleviate the really annoying problem of no one having the full file, which, obviously, prevents anyone from ever getting it.  This is sort of a “long tail” problem: after the rush is over, you often end up with BitTorrent not being so awesome.  (And, if you set your throttled upload bandwidth to be inversely proportional to the number of seeders, when no one else is seeding it, there’s really no difference between someone downloading your file over BitTorrent and downloading it directly from your server.)

Of course, you’ll still have to distribute over FTP/HTTP, since not everyone can use BitTorrent. But, if you distribute it ‘normally’ over HTTP, you create an incentive for people to just download it from you, bypassing BitTorrent, which ruins the whole plan. So you also need to be able to throttle your bandwidth on those services, to make sure that it’s never faster than BitTorrent.

I really think there should be an all-in-one package to do this, so the host just runs a quick command on the server, and the file’s immediately being seeded on BitTorrent and available on HTTP/FTP. And for all of “us,” just think of situations that, say, Linux distributions must have with distributing large files.

This could even be a hosted service: a decent amount of people providing things like games have been smart enough to embrace BitTorrent. The market’s there. There’s just nowhere offering this.